The Best American Mystery Stories 2011

Contributors' Notes

Brock Adams is the author of Gulf, a collection of short stories. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review, A capella Zoo, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among many others. He grew up in Panama City, Florida, and studied at the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida, where he received his MFA. He lives with his wife, Jill, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they both write and teach at USC Upstate.

▪ "Audacious" had a simple beginning: I wanted to write a story about crowds. There's something fascinating about the level of anonymity that can exist even when surrounded by hundreds of people. I knew who Gerald was, and I knew who Audi was, but I had nothing of the story planned other than them sensing each other's loneliness in the midst of a crowd. They took it from there.

I'm amazed at the success that "Audacious" has had. When I wrote it, I had no idea if it worked at all. The others in my workshop panned it. They wanted to see Audi steal from Gerald. They wanted to see Gerald and Audi have sex. They wanted lots of things and I ignored them all, and the story works as it is: simple and sad. It taught me the most important thing I learned in school: you have to know when to listen, but sometimes you have to know when to ignore everybody else.

Eric Barnes is the author of the novel Shimmer (2009), an IndieNext pick that is a dark and sometimes comic novel about a person who's built a company based entirely on a lie. He also has published short stories in Raritan, Washington Square Review, North Atlantic Review, Tampa Review, and a number of other journals. He has been a reporter, editor, and publisher in Connecticut, New York, and now Memphis. Years ago he drove a forklift in Tacoma, Washington, and then in Kenai, Alaska, worked construction on Puget Sound, and froze fish in a warehouse outside Anchorage. He has an MFA from Columbia University and is the publisher of three newspapers covering business and politics in Memphis and Nashville.

▪ I wrote the first version of "Something Pretty, Something Beautiful" a number of years ago, as part of a series of stories about Tacoma, where I grew up, and four friends who lived there. They are all very dark stories, and every time I reread one, I like them even more, yet am also slightly more disturbed that I was ever able to write them in the first place.

Lawrence Block has been doing this long enough to have collected lifetime achievement awards from Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the (U.K.) Crime Writers Association. He'll be publishing two books in 2011, A Drop of the Hard Stuff and Getting Off.

▪ I'd written a couple of short stories about a young woman who picked up men for sex, went home with them, had a fine time in bed with them, and capped it off by killing them. I couldn't get her out of my head, and found myself wondering why she was doing this, and how she got this way, and where she was going with it. "Clean Slate" was the result.

Max Allan Collins has earned an unprecedented sixteen Private Eye Writers of America Shamus nominations, winning for True Detective (1983) and Stolen Away (1993) in his Nathan Heller series, which includes the recent Bye Bye, Baby. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis of the Academy Award-winning film.

Both Collins and Mickey Spillane (who died in 2006) received the Private Eye Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Eye.

▪ Mickey Spillane said to his wife, Jane, just days before his passing, "After I'm gone, there'll be a treasure hunt around here-give everything you find to Max. He'll know what to do." Mickey was the hero of my adolescence, and the direct inspiration for my career. So it's hard for me to think of a greater honor.

Jane, my wife, Barb, and I went through the voluminous files in Mickey's three offices in his South Carolina home. Among the treasures discovered were half-a-dozen incomplete Hammer novels-all running 100 manuscript pages or more-and three of these (thus far) have appeared: The Goliath Bone, The Big Ban g, and Kiss Her Goodbye. We also discovered a number of shorter fragments that I felt would be better served as short stories.

"A Long Time Dead" was one of the most interesting of those fragments, and one that clearly appeared to be intended as a short story, not a novel. For the Spillane fan/scholar, this is particularly exciting, because Mickey published only a handful of Mike Hammer short stories in his lifetime. David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil's Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I'm Running?, published in March 2010 ("a rich, hard-hitting epic"- Publishers Weekly, starred review). Corbett's short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies, and his story "Pretty Little Parasite" was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009. For more, go to www.davidcorbett.com.

▪ When Luis was in San Francisco being feted because The Hummingbird's Daughter had been chosen for the One City One Book distinction, we met through a mutual friend, Kathi Kamen Goldmark, discovered we also had a mutual friend in John Connolly, and just basically hit it off. Then Luis, whose tastes are nothing if not eclectic, talked about collaborating on something in the genre realm, using his exhaustive knowledge of the border and Mexican arcana and my instincts for straight-ahead train-wreck plotting. It sounded like fun, but our other obligations kept us from doing anything but talking about it until Bobby Byrd, the editor of Lone Star Noir, approached Luis for a story and he (Luis) decided to throw me a bone. He had the main character, Chester Richard, already in mind, as well as the Cajun/zydeco musical background, the Port Arthur locale, and a few other impressionistic details. I added a few things of my own, we tossed a few other ideas back and forth, and then we agreed on a general story idea. I took first whack, Luis batted second, I did some minor cleanup, and we sent it on. It turned out to be strangely hassle-free, since Luis is both wildly imaginative and incredibly easy to work with.

Brendan DuBois of New Hampshire is the award-winning author of twelve novels and more than one hundred short stories. His latest novel, Deadly Cove, was published in July 2011. His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and numerous other magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, published in 2000 and edited by Tony Hillerman and Otto Penzler. His short stories have twice won him the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and have also earned him three Edgar Allan Poe Award nominations from the Mystery Writers of America. Visit his website at www.BrendanDuBois.com.

▪ As a former newspaper reporter, I had scores of opportunities to go with police officers on ride-alongs, where I sat next to them in the front seat of police cruisers and got a firsthand look at "serving and protecting" the general public. Among the things I learned: ride-alongs at night are more productive; always take an anti-motion-sickness pill before leaving the station (cops are aggressive when it comes to braking and accelerating); and when responding at high speed with lights on and sirens racing, just relax-everything is out of your hands.

There are some slow evening shifts when the most important decision is what kind of muffin to buy, and there are other nights when you're responding to an "officer needs assistance" call, barreling down a two-lane road, going one hundred miles an hour.

And you learn other things as well: that during night ride-alongs, when the majority of people are home and asleep, there's a whole different breed of people who are out and about in one's community-the lonely, the drinkers, and the troublemakers. A mixture that often leads to arrests and crime stories. In "Ride-Along," I decided to make the troublemakers the ones inside the police cruiser, and not outside. It was a fun story to write, and I'm honored to have it appear in this anthology.

Loren D. Estleman's first novel was published in 1976. Since that time he has published sixty-five books, including mainstream and historical novels and the Amos Walker series, which debuted in 1980. In 2002 his alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, honored him with a doctorate in humane letters. He lives in Michigan with his wife, the author Deborah Morgan. Infernal Angels, the twenty-first Amos Walker novel, was released this past summer.

▪ When Tyrus Books asked me to compose a new story for Amos Waker: The Complete Story Collection, I started with the title "Sometimes a Hyena." This was nothing new; most of my ideas start with a title, although years may pass before I come up with a story to stick on the end of it. In this case, a joke I'd heard in several versions led to speculation over how one news story can lead to another, and I began writing with no clear idea where I was going. Of course, the real mystery is, who knows what makes a joke work?

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three books of poems (Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables) and a book of nonfiction (Great with Child). She's won a Pushcart Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. Tom Franklin is the author of one collection of short stories (Poachers) and three novels (Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter). He has won an Edgar and a Guggenheim. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford, Mississippi, and teach in the MFA program at Ole Miss. Together they have collaborated on short stories and short people (Anna Claire, nine, Thomas, five, and Nolan, three weeks).

▪ The seeds of "What His Hands Had Been Waiting For" began years ago, when Tommy wrote a bad story about zombies chomping through an apocalyptic wasteland and, thankfully, put it in a drawer. Later, he and Beth Ann were asked to contribute a story to an anthology of Mississippi blues tales. Feeling uninspired, he went to his drawer of failed attempts but couldn't make much happen, though on rereading the zombie story he realized it had some potential. Tommy gave the story to Beth Ann to see if she could help resurrect it. She got rid of the zombies and set about researching the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, figuring that sometimes what really happened with real live humans is much wilder than anything they could make up for zombies to do. They had so much fun writing this story together that now they are using it as the basis of an as-yet-untitled novel.

Ernest J. Finney is a native Californian and a sympathetic, though often amused and sometimes outraged, observer of daily life within that state. California figures large in all his fiction. His four novels take place in the San Francisco Bay area, the Sierra, and the San Joaquin Valley. His short fiction appears often in literary journals and anthologies, including the O. Henry Prize Stories, in which his story "Peacocks" was a first-prize winner. Each of his two story collections received a California Book Award. His third collection, Sequoia Gardens: California Stories was published in February 2011. Finney lives and writes on Pliocene Ridge in Sierra County, California.

▪ "A Crime of Opportunity" began with a platter of General Tso's chicken in a restaurant on Clement Street in San Francisco and a conversation about a novice public defender known as the Funeral Director by a host of unfortunate felons hoping for a life sentence but anticipating death row. Delilah emerged full-grown by the end of the meal. Renée was inspired by one of my mothers-in-law, who had a lot to say about life lessons.

Ed Gorman has published more than twenty mystery and suspense novels and seven collections of short stories. Over the years he's won a Shamus, twice been nominated for the Edgar, won an Anthony, and been short-listed for a Silver Dagger. Two of his books have been filmed, one as a low-budget feature and one as a TV movie. Kirkus Reviews called him "one of the most original crime writers around," while the San Francisco Examiner noted that "Gorman has a wonderful writing style that allows him to say things of substance in an entertaining way." Presently he writes the Dev Conrad series, dark political thrillers, and the Sam McCain books, which have followed the life of a young attorney from the late fifties up into the seventies.

▪ "Flying Solo" is the result of sitting in chemo rooms for the past nine years dealing with my multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer. You buy as much time as you can. I've been very, very lucky so far. I'd been noticing a sad-eyed nurse for several visits. I'd never dealt with her, but one day she gave me my IVs and I noticed a bruise on her cheek. This day she looked forlorn. She told me she was tired, that she'd moved into an apartment with her two kids late the night before. I assumed she was a battered wife. You hear and see a lot in chemo rooms-usually nothing soap operatic (the rooms I've been in are generally friendly places with a lot of smiling faces)-but every once in a while a mask will slip and you get a glimpse of cancer turmoil. Of fear. And not only of cancer but of personal lives that the disease has only made more difficult. Couples divorcing following a cancer diagnosis is not unheard-of. All this caused me to drag out my nickel notebook one day and start taking notes about a mismatched pair of old cancer patients who decided they'd spend whatever time they had left taking care of the nurses and patients in the chemo room. And I still prefer James Garner.

James Grady is the author of Six Days of the Condor, a dozen more novels, and as many short stories, which often appear in "Best of" collections. He's covered politics, crime, spies, and terrorists as a journalist since Watergate, written for TV and the movies, been awarded France's Grand Prix de Roman Noir, Italy's Raymond Chandler Award, Japan's Baku-Misu literature award, and been nominated for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar. London's Daily Telegraph named Grady as one of "fifty crime writers to read before you die."

▪ "Destiny City" let me shed light on the complex mysteries of terrorism and the often messy means we use to fight it. To make sure I got the story as right as writing can, I worked with our good guys and with terrorists-an interesting literary journalism dance. I also wanted to show readers snapshots of America they might not glimpse out the windows of their moving cars, but more than anything, I wanted to bring to life characters-heroes, villains, victims-who, like all of us, navigate through a fog of power politics and personal dreams.

Chris F. Holm was born in Syracuse, New York, the grandson of a cop who passed along his passion for crime fiction. He wrote his first story at the age of six. It got him sent to the principal's office. Since then his work has fared better, appearing in such publications as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Needle magazine, Beat to a Pulp, and Thuglit. He's been a Derringer Award finalist and a Spinetingler Award winner, and he's also written a novel or two, which he'd likely show you if you asked him nice.

▪ I'm not sure where the idea for "The Hitter" came from, but I remember precisely when it arrived. It was late one Sunday night in April of 2010, and I was lying in bed, drifting off to sleep. As my mind wandered, a scene ran through my head. A city square in some nameless banana republic. A teeming crowd, cheering on a petty despot. And above them all, watching through a gun sight, an assassin. Truth be told, I didn't think much of it until that assassin pulled the trigger-three pounds' pressure, no more, no less-and I realized that the petty despot wasn't the target. Once that happened, any pretense of a good night's sleep evaporated, and I leapt from bed, running to my computer to get down everything I could remember before it faded in the way that dreams do. See, a political assassination is straightforward, uncomplicated-a matter of money or of zealotry, nothing more. But my hitter's motives were of a subtler sort, and I knew that, much as I'd like never to meet him, I wanted to know what made him tick.

Three weeks later, the story was written. I thought it too long for most markets, but Steve Weddle, editor of the then not-yet-published Needle magazine, assured me that Needle was not your average market. Turns out Steve was right-which seems fitting, since Jake is hardly your average hitman.

Harry Hunsicker is the former executive vice president of the Mystery Writers of America and the author of three novels, crime thrillers about a Dallas private investigator with the unfortunate name of Lee Henry Oswald. In 2006 his debut novel, Still River, was nominated for a Shamus Award by the Private Eye Writers of America, and in 2010 his short story "Iced" was nominated for a Thriller Award by the International Thriller Writers. Hunsicker lives in Dallas, where, when not working on a book, he is a commercial real estate appraiser and an occasional speaker on creative writing.

▪ "West of Nowhere" came to me in the form of an opening line about a man so inept his friends called him Danny the Dumb-ass. From there I imagined a small crew of robbers, each damaged and ill-functioning in his or her own special way. I placed them in Central Texas, a region where I spent a great deal of time as a child and young adult. For some reason, the relationship between these three lifelong friends solidified itself in my mind early on, and the story grew of its own volition.

Richard Lange is the author of the short story collection Dead Boys and the novel This Wicked World. His stories have appeared in the Sun, the Iowa Review, The Best American Mystery Stories 2004, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly's Fiction for Kindle series. He was the 2008 recipient of the Rosen-thal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. He is currently working on a novel and another collection of stories.

▪ Children get shot in Los Angeles. It's a fact. Well, children get shot everywhere, but I live in L.A. and write about the city, so it's our dead children I was thinking of when I wrote "Baby Killer." One child in particular, actually, a four-year-old boy who happened to be walking down the street with his sister one afternoon when the local gangsters opened fire on a passing car. A stray bullet hit the boy in the chest, killing him.

People process tragedies like this in different ways. I'm a writer, so I write. And I resurrected a dead woman to tell this story. Blanca was a character from a failed novel, long laid to rest. I brought her back to life and started her talking, and little by little the tale came out. As with all of my stories, I wasn't sure where it was going until it got there. When it did, I wished it had ended a little better for Blanca. But it didn't. I also wish that little boy had never died, but he did. I hate this goddamn world sometimes, I really do.

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and twenty short story collections, numerous essays and articles, and scripts. He has edited or coedited more than thirty anthologies. His work has been filmed, turned into comics, and performed on the stage. His story "Bubba Hotep" was turned into a cult film. He has received numerous awards for his work, among them the Edgar, seven Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzane Cavour Prize, the Herodotus Award for Historical Fiction, the Inkpot Award for lifetime achievement in the field of comics, fantasy, and science fiction. He has had two New York Times Notable Books. A martial artist for forty-nine years, he is the founder of Lansdale's Shen Chuan, Martial Science, has been inducted into the Martial Arts Hall of Fame four times, and owns a martial arts school in Nacogdoches, Texas. He teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he is writer in residence. Currently he is helping produce the low-budget film Christmas with the Dead, based on his story of the same name.

▪ I was born in Gladewater, Texas, and my first memory is of a house on a hill overlooking a honky-tonk, a highway, and a drive-in theater. My mother and I watched the drive-in from the windows of our house, and she told me what characters were saying. From then on I was hooked on storytelling and have often written about drive-ins and honky-tonks and the people who kept them in business. I began to learn boxing and wrestling from my father at an early age; he was forty-two years old when I was born. He could neither read nor write, but like my mother, who could, he was a great storyteller. He rode the rails during the Great Depression from one carnival to the next, where he wrestled or boxed for money. My mother encouraged my love for writing, my father my love for all manner of martial arts. I still practice them both. On my way to becoming a writer I've been an aluminum chair worker, farmer, field hand, bodyguard of sorts, and a janitor. I like writing and martial arts best. Follow me on Twitter. My handle is joelansdale.

Charles McCarry, born in 1930 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestsellers, The Miernik Dossier (1973) and The Tears of Autumn (1975). He is the author of nine other novels, translated into more than thirty languages, and the author, coauthor, or editor of nine nonfiction books, in addition to short stories, poems, and about a million words of journalism in leading American and foreign magazines. As a young man he drafted speeches for a president, a presidential candidate, and other politicians. During the early Cold War, he spent an uninterrupted decade abroad as a CIA agent under deep cover. Later on he was the editor in charge of freelance operations at National Geographic and wrote the magazine's official history for its one hundredth anniversary in 1988. He and his wife, Nancy, married since 1953, live in south Florida in winter and the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts in summer.

▪ "The End of the String" is autobiographical in the sense that it closely reflects the atmosphere and, to a degree, the reality of some of the things I experienced as a secret agent fifty-odd years ago in Africa. As is true of most works of fiction, parts of this story are invented and parts of it are drawn from vivid memory. I knew places like Ndala and made friends with men like Benjamin, the leading character in this tale, and lived through episodes that were not so very different from the ones in this story. But there is no parallel Ndala or real Benjamin. They are, by design, different enough from the originals to give away no secrets. Even for writers who never took an oath of secrecy, fiction is, after all, what ought to have been, not what actually was. At least, not exactly.

Dennis McFadden lives and writes in an old farmhouse called Mountjoy on Bliss Road, just up Peaceable Street from Harmony Corners in upstate New York. His collection of linked stories, Hart's Grove, was published in June 2010, and his fiction has appeared in dozens of publications, including the Missouri Review, New England Review, Massachusetts Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, CutBank, and South Carolina Review.

▪ For a writer, the blessing of rejection is the opportunity it affords the rejected story to grow and develop. "Diamond Alley" was afforded ample opportunity. One of my earliest stories, it began as a simple vignette about a teenaged peeping Tom and the Voice of the Pittsburgh Pirates, but it underwent some serious evolution after that humble beginning. Over the years the characters and lore of the small, fictional town of Hart's Grove began to take shape and take over, insinuating themselves into the story from the roots up. "Diamond Alley" probably grew most and developed best, however, the day I decided to shift the narration to the first-person-plural point of view; then, instead of a man remembering a murder that had occurred when he was a boy, I had a Greek chorus singing a Greek tragedy.

As for the mystery in this story, it's not much different from the mystery in every story I write-mystery in the sense that we can never really know everything that is happening in our lives, or anything that will happen after them. It's just that this one is magnified by murder. But mysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can't resist the lure of omniscience; given that, and given the nature of the linked collection, it's not surprising that the answer to the primary mystery of "Diamond Alley"- who do you suppose really killed her? -lies naked there in Hart's Grove for all who care to see.

Christopher Merkner's stories have recently appeared in Black Warrior Review, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, and Cincinnati Review. He teaches creative writing for the University of Colorado, Denver.

▪ "Last Cottage" started as a touching and lighthearted meditation on my youth and my hometown in Illinois. I don't know what went wrong. At some point it became clear that the story had no interest in being touching or lighthearted. Writing and rewriting, I could not drop the image of the carp that sucked the surface of the lakes and rivers near my hometown. I have so many good memories of my youth in northern Illinois, but those carp-those mouths gasping and sucking, those oily eyes rolling-kept returning instead. So I decided to kill them. "Last Cottage" followed. A huge thanks to Brock Clarke and the amazing people at the Cincinnati Review for their help and support and encouragement.

Andrew Riconda lives on City Island in the Bronx. His fiction has appeared in the Amherst Review, Criminal Class Review, Oyez Review, Phantasmagoria, Rio Grande Review, Watchword, and William and Mary Review. He is currently at work on a novel, The Three People I Had to Kill Last Year, featuring the protagonist of the story in this collection.

▪ "Heart Like a Balloon" was my first attempt at the mystery genre. Most of my stories are quirky tales about sad, alienated men-just without crimes, guns, paring knives, and the flayed skin. Like many of my characters, the narrator, Brian Rehill, is trying to remain God-oblivious in a world that just won't permit that. Speaking of deities, I like to think that one of the gods of quirky crime tales, Charles Willeford, might have enjoyed this story. Hail Hoke Moseley.

S. J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a lifelong New Yorker. She's the author of eleven books in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, the most recent of which is Ghost Hero. She also has two standalones, Absent Friends and In This Rain, and three dozen short stories published in various periodicals and anthologies, including a number of "Best of the Year" collections. She has won the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity Awards for best novel, as well as the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and the Edgar for best short story. She lectures and teaches widely and runs an English-language writing workshop in the summers in Assisi, Italy. Visit www.sjrozan.com.

▪ I get a lot of comments from readers about Lydia Chin's mother. Everyone, it seems, either knows someone with a mother like Chin Yong-Yun or has one. (My favorite comment ever at a book signing: a young Chinese man who said, "I only have one question. When did you meet my mother?") "Chin Yong-Yun Takes a Case" was my first shot at giving Ma Chin her own voice, at seeing things from her side of the kitchen table. It probably won't be the last; I have a feeling she's just getting started.

Mickey Spillane was the best-selling American mystery writer of the twentieth century. He introduced Mike Hammer in I, the Jury (1947), which sold in the millions, as did the six tough mysteries that soon followed. The controversial PI has been the subject of a radio show, a comic strip, two television series, and numerous films, notably director Robert Aldrich's seminal film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of several books, among them In Search of Snow, The Hummingbird's Daughter (winner of the Kiriyama Prize), and The Devil's Highway (a finalist for the Pulitzer and winner of the Lannan Literary Award). He was born in Mexico and currently lives in the Chicago area, where he teaches at the University of Illinois. His story "Amapola," from Phoenix Noir, won the Edgar Award in 2010.

▪ This story began its life as a set of notes dating back to my time as writer in residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I was taken-as who wouldn't be-by zydeco music and Cajun/Creole culture. I was a huge Beau Jocque fan, and when I finally met him and talked one night, I knew a zydeco story had to happen. I jotted notes for a "literary" fiction. What is that? I knew ol' Chester Richard was my hero, but beyond that… I had no idea. My advice to all lazy writers is to team up with David Corbett. He writes like some well-oiled machine and apparently doesn't mind doing a year's worth of research in one night.